Scripting News for 1/31/2008

Why does Twitter go down? 

Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it’s been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is.

The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don’t think last night’s Republican debate took Twitter down.

Anyway, I’d like to really understand what’s going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they’re confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I’d like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what’s going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there’s some kind of international crisis.

Twitter wouldn’t exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what’s going on. Let’s have some real honest direct communication?

PS: I was going to post a link to this on Twitter, but arrrrgh!

PPS: I’d like to try the Jabber interface. Does anyone have a server I could have an account on. Yes, I know Gmail is a Jabber server, but I want to run scripts against it, and they use interfaces my scripting environment doesn’t support.

Who is Gore for? 

David Weinberger asks a question I’ve been wondering about, who does Al Gore endorse for President in 2008?

Micro-Digg, oy — honeypot for idiots 

I should have known…

The idiots want to rule the Reddit I started for Scripting News readers. I couldn’t figure out how to delete it, and while trying, I deleted my account, so forget the experiment, and if anyone at Reddit is listening, could you please delete it for me. (I sent an email but there was no response.)

Still diggin!

Scripting News for 1/31/2008

Why does Twitter go down? 

Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it’s been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is.

The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don’t think last night’s Republican debate took Twitter down.

Anyway, I’d like to really understand what’s going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they’re confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I’d like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what’s going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there’s some kind of international crisis.

Twitter wouldn’t exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what’s going on. Let’s have some real honest direct communication?

PS: I was going to post a link to this on Twitter, but arrrrgh!

PPS: I’d like to try the Jabber interface. Does anyone have a server I could have an account on. Yes, I know Gmail is a Jabber server, but I want to run scripts against it, and they use interfaces my scripting environment doesn’t support.

PPPS: Andrew Baron’s Twitter-down art colletion.

Who is Gore for? 

David Weinberger asks a question I’ve been wondering about, who does Al Gore endorse for President in 2008?

Micro-Digg, oy — honeypot for idiots 

I should have known…

The idiots want to rule the Reddit I started for Scripting News readers. I couldn’t figure out how to delete it, and while trying, I deleted my account, so forget the experiment, and if anyone at Reddit is listening, could you please delete it for me. (I sent an email but there was no response.)

Still diggin!

Scripting News for 1/29/2008

FlickrFan belongs in schools 

Lance Knobel: “I’d install FlickrFan in every middle school and high school social studies class. I guarantee it would provoke endless discussion and ensure engagement in the issues of the day.”

I totally agree. It would be great to see it at checkout lines in supermarkets and on kiosks in BART stations too.

Covering eTech in March 

I’ll be covering the eTech conference in San Diego in early March. It’s been a few years, last time I went was just before my surgery in 2002. I’ll be going as a blogger, not presenting. Many thanks to O’Reilly for approving the press pass. I look forward to catching up with many old friends.

Light posting 

I have a juicy project I’m working on, a new source of great pics for FlickrFan. In the meantime Stan Krute did a new version of the Obama poster, to the right, with the “Progress” swapped out and “Make change” in its place.

Update: Jim Posner suggested the original was better, on reflection I agree, so I switched it back.

Scripting News for 1/28/2008

I’m a California voter for Obama 

I’ve got an Obama poster in the right margin of the home page of Scripting News. It’ll stay there for the duration as a virtual equivalent of one of those signs people put on their front lawns. I live in California, one of the Super Tuesday states and I’m an Obama voter. That’s what the poster means. Pass it on.

After Google indexes Scripting News, this query will have exactly one match. Right now it has none. Let’s load up Google with lots of blogs with Californians voting for Obama. And of course every other state in the union.

PS: This is where I got the poster.

Chris Matthews said something intelligent 

Most of what Chris Matthews says is mindless trash, but today he pulled out a great analogy immediately after Ted Kennedy’s stirring endorsement of Obama.

He compared Hillary Clinton to the character Salieri in the movie Amadeus. Until Mozart came along he was the leading composer in Vienna, but he was just a workman, a technician. Mozart had inspiration, feeling, the spirit. Salieri, even though he lived a long life and Mozart died young, is a footnote to Mozart’s lasting greatness.

Matthews nailed it.

Maybe this makes up for his calling the voters of New Hampshire racists because he and every other pundit read the polling data wrong.

Bill Clinton as Trent Lott 2.0 

Yesterday’s piece, lightly edited, on the Huffington Post.

http://x98.us/jz

I think it looks pretty good over there!

Scripting News for 1/27/2008

Find a shared vision, v2.0 

It was an interesting election until the Clintons started calling Obama the nice young African-American candidate. Yeah, I lived in the south long enough to understand what that means. When I went to Tulane I was often explained as soandso’s Jewish friend Dave. It meant that I could come over for dinner, but there would never be a marriage.

I should say The Old South. The problem for the Clintons is that the country has changed, as recently as the generation that’s now in its early 20s. Because of my experience at Harvard, I know quite a few of them, and I promise you, race doesn’t mean to them what it meant when I was their age. To them, this country is a melting pot where we’ve not only accepted blacks and Hispanics, but people from incredibly far away with incredible complexions, hair, clothes, traditions and names. Amazingly, it’s still America.

This time around a young African-American with a funny name is very mainstream, so much so that the blatant appeal racism of the white-haired old man is as ridiculous as the praise Trent Lott gave to the almost-dead holdover from the Old South, Strom Thurmond.

The problem for Clinton is actually much worse, we now saw how she’d govern. Let’s say a young African-American Senator from Illiinois got in the way. Would she argue the issues with him in a respectful way? Why bother when you can smear him into silence. Now she spins around like her husband oblivious to what the rest of us suspected, and now knows for sure. If there isn’t now a landslide of support for Obama, from all segments of the Democratic Party and from many Republicans, then our country truly is without hope. I suspect that’s not what will happen, and we’ll see the same kind of weak attempt at redemption that Trent Lott tried after his fiasco. It won’t work, because, as with Lott, we’ve seen too much.

Now do we know that Obama would be any different? We don’t. My cynical side says of course he’s just like the Clintons say. “Give me a break” — it’s a “fairy tale.” (BTW, I’m quoting the Clintons accurately, a form of respect they don’t practice.) Maybe they’re right. Maybe this is the last (futile) gasp of hope in America for America. Okay, maybe so. But I’m willing to give it one more try. I think it would say to the rest of the world that America has caught up with reality. Look at how we’ve changed. Maybe they’ll put pictures of Obama in their public buildings as they did with JFK. I could think of worse things. (Caroline Kennedy thinks it’s possible.)

What a fantastic way to recover from Bush, who so completely represented the greed and arrogance and uglyness of America, to reinvent ourselves in the image of our best, in the image of hope.

Hope, that’s the difference, and it’s not just a word. We’ve all been disempowered during the Clinton and Bush years, sidelined. I remember when I gave up on Clinton, it was during the brightest period of hope for the web, when they passed a compromise that said that the First Amendment didn’t apply here. There are some things that are so important that you can’t compromise on them. It was then that I knew that Clinton (and Gore) were phonies. Maybe Obama isn’t. I never thought I’d get another chance to use my vote to say, along with so many other Americans, that we still believe the bullshit they taught us in school and that our grandparents taught us, and that the flag says to us every time we think of what it means. There’s a reason this country is so great. We forgot it. Let’s remember.

Bill Clinton wanted us to think well of him when he spoke at Davos in 2000. I choose to remember what he said then, Find A Shared Vision. If by any chance he should read this, I’d say it’s time for you to not just say those words but to live them.

A Reddit for Scripting News 

Here’s the new Reddit for Scripting News…

http://reddit.com/r/scripting/

Please, if you’re a regular reader of this site, bookmark it, and when you want to contribute a link to the community, add it there. Do the normal thing you do with Reddit or Digg, move articles up or down, according to your opinion of how relevant they are to the community defined by this weblog.

Warning: I will moderate, heavily if necessary, to keep it from being abusive or overly immature. Sorry for having to post the caveat, but you know how it goes.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Twitter 

If there were such a book, it would say, instead of Don’t Panic:

No need for anyone to suffer.

Twitter is not a mail list or a chat room. No one has an investment in anyone else’s manners. If what someone says causes you too much angst, just unfollow. It’s a single click.

More advice for Twitter newbies? Please post a comment.

Update: A pretty long list from The Last Podcast blog.

Scripting News for 1/26/2008

Barack Obama for President 

Don Park made a Barack Obama postage stamp.

Everybody’s diving bell 

I met an old friend for coffee in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and had a few hours to kill before stopping in at the Wired reunion party. I didn’t want to drive back to Berkeley because the weather was so crummy, and I was just across the street from a movie theater and was just in time for the start of a movie that lots of people had been telling me to see. So I went.

The movie — The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I had no idea what it was about until the movie started, then I remembered hearing a Fresh Air show about it and finding it too painful to listen to. Now here I was in the theater, not just being asked to listen to it, but being asked to live it. Through some very wonderful film-making, you feel as if what is happening to the main character is happening to you. Or more accurately, probably, you get the slightest hint of what it’s like to be this person. My immediate impulse, one which I gave serious consideration to, was to pack up my things and leave. Anything would be better than spending three hours living this guy’s life.

Two things happen over time: 1. You get over it. 2. They change perspective, and instead of being inside his body, you move outside it.

I think those two things are the story we all live as we mature and learn to live inside our own bodies, with their limits. You learn to step outside and see the humor in your predicament. The main character says he lives in a diving bell because it’s as hard for him to communicate with other people as it would be at the bottom of the ocean inside a diving bell. The movie teaches that it’s not much easier for the rest of us, even though we can manipulate symbols better. On the other hand, of course it is.

The film develops a relationship between the hero and his father, between the hero and his own children, his ex-wife, his lover. Each of them reflects off some part of his struggle, and each of them has to learn a new language to communicate not only with the man in the diving bell, but to communicate through their own diving bells. All the acting is great, esp Max von Sydow who plays the hero’s 92-year-old father.

We strive for deeper understanding of ourselves and each other. But it may be ridiculously easy to find the only meaning that exists, without language, without intellect, by just being.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly should probably be the picture of the year for 2007, it’s that good. But like all great art it shows you something truthful about yourself, and you may or may not want to see it.

Update: Jim Forbes on life after a stroke.

Find a shared vision 

Now after a few days at Davos our correspondents, Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington, are starting to get into the groove. I’m sure much has changed there since I went, in 2000, but I can tell that some important things haven’t.

For a first time Davoser, the most important thing is to build your network. Until you have a way to share the experience, you’re not really there yet.

At first it’s all about being star-struck. Look there’s Henry Kissinger (in my year it was Madeline Allbright). And there’s Yassir Arafat (he’s dead now). Shimon Peres was there in 2000, but now he’s back in power. As was the king of Jordan, but he was very young, now like me, he has more gray hair.

My year was the year of “How Do You Make Money on the Internet.” So that’s what I wrote about. And it was also the valedictory year for Bill Clinton. His struggles were behind him, he could now look forward to one more year in office and then a lifetime as a former President. John McCain had won New Hampshire while Davos was on, and the nastiness in South Carolina was about to start.

You could tell that Clinton had the weight off his shoulders. He still had Air Force One for a year, he could become a statesman, and he was doing a great job of it. Jet-lagged and with no American TV cameras recording the speech he said “Find a shared vision,” his formula for finding peace in the Middle East. I was inspired. He can be a great speaker, almost as great as Barack Obama. I tried to take his message to Bill Gates and Steve Case, both whom are off the tech stage now, replaced by Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg. FASV is still the challenge. Seems BillC could use a dose of his own advice. Amazing that the Democrats can’t find a shared vision. I always thought Clinton was a phony, I gave him the benefit of the doubt in Davos in 2000. He didn’t deserve it, he’s proving in 2008.

When Scoble and Arrington come home let’s hope they can help us find a shared vision. The great thing about Davos, imho, is the elevation and the clean mountain air can improve your vision, and inspire you to great heights. The trick is to bring that home with you, hold it and nurture it, and build something from it. I think the great leaders on stage don’t get that feeling as much as the newbies do. You only go to your first Davos once, Mike and Robert, let it work its magic on you.

Scripting News for 1/25/2008

Tennessee Rex 

Hammock: “My blog still doesn’t ‘carry’ advertising — it is advertising.”

8/3/06: “I have put ads on some of my sites, but never on Scripting News.”

Note that Mike Arrington, who started this thread, doesn’t have ads on Crunchnotes. Curious to know why no ads there. Screen shot.

Scripting News for 1/24/2008

$100 to Obama 

Fed up with lies from the Clintons, I gave $100 to the Obama campaign.

I was totally on the fence until they started saying he said things he didn’t say. Maybe I could have ignored it if he hadn’t been saying things we need him to say, imho. The reason people running for office don’t try to express complicated ideas is because people like the Clintons will spin it with confusion, and try to convince us he said something idiotic, corrupt or naive.

And even that wouldn’t be so bad, but the insult of the Clintons isn’t that they’re playing unfairly to defeat a good candidate, but they’re insulting our intelligence or saying we’re ignorant. The only way we could misunderstand what they’re doing is if we didn’t understand what Obama said, or if we didn’t bother to listen. Speaking for myself only, neither are true.

To be clear, Obama said something that Pat Moynihan said first, a NY Democrat known for his intellect. He said that the Republicans had become the “party of ideas.” Neither Moynihan or Obama said the ideas were good, or supportable, just that they had some.

The Democrats, Obama said, were not known for having ideas. I would agree with that. Further, the most effective Presidents have been those who could express simple important truths in ways that got people to listen and act. The greatest Presidents are the ones who did that, and who led us to a good place or a necessary one. The two outstanding Presidents in recent history are Roosevelt and Kennedy, both Democrats. That we have a candidate this year who aspires to be a Roosevelt or a Kennedy is something I support. If he doesn’t win because the electorate prefers a technocrat and workhorse (Hillary Clinton) so be it. But I’ll never forgive the Clintons if they win by dragging our aspirations down into the mud, which after all is what they did when they were in office.

Who knows how their marriage works, and after all this time, who wants to know? I sure don’t. But that’s becoming a central issue in the 2008 election, as it becomes more clear that the Clinton family is running for a third term, circumventing the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. It’s a bad idea.

If we want to do a great job of digging out of the Bush mess, we’re going to need great leadership and we’re going to have to rally behind and support our leader. Now that the primary campaign may well be entering its final phase, it’s clear we’re now at a fairly historic moment. My vote goes not just for change, but for hope. Obama might not be the most qualified at a technical level, but we can make up for that. We the people, this is our country, to make something of, or to give up on. A vote for the Clintons is giving up on our greatness. A vote for Obama says “Let’s keep going.”

Postscript: Ways we can help.

What woke me up about the Clintons 

A couple of weeks ago I didn’t really think Bill Clinton would be a problem if HIllary was elected. I thought he might be a curmudgeonly joke of a First Lady. “There he goes again, he’s so funny.”

Yeah uh huh. Sure.

I didn’t think it was an issue until Bill started throwing the mud so aggressively. Then I noticed that Hillary was talking about the first two terms as a plural accomplishment, as if she were in office then. The more he attacks and the more she takes credit for the first two terms, the more I think they’re fucking with the Constitution.

Further, there are good reasons why the first lady (or first spouse) isn’t actively involved in running the government, so we don’t have to understand how good their marriage is, and they get a tiny bit of privacy. Then we remember how their marriage was in the middle of everything when they were in charge, and god damn we don’t need that mess now. We’ve got so many other things to deal with.

I’m so opposed to them that depending on who the Republicans nominate I could actually see myself voting for a Republican if Hillary is nominated. I can’t believe that after listening to her on Meet The Press a couple of weeks ago I was almost ready to vote for her. What a mistake that would have been.

Ways we can help 

I had two ideas of ways people can help the US, maybe there will be more.

1. When the President and Congress announce their stimulus package immediately give your share to the Obama campaign. Even if you haven’t gotten the check yet. You can be sure that they’ll spend the money immediately, and that will stimulate the economy. And maybe we can get the candidate in the mood again to give us some of those inspiring speeches he’s so good at. I find that stimulating, I don’t know about you.

2. This is a missed opportunity. John Edwards, in the debate on Monday, could have said to Hillary in his famous southern drawl. “I don’t know how y’all up there in the north do it, but down here we try to quote people accurately Hill. We both know that Barack may not be the perfect candidate, god knows I’d be a better president, but sheeeeeyit, he didn’t say what you said he said. How about sticking to the facts?” He might have got my vote then and there. He didn’t do it. He should be kicking himself for it now.

3. Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards should challenge Bill Clinton to a spouse’s debate. Both women are eloquent and forceful advocates, as Hillary Clinton said so well. This would position Bill Clinton in a legally accurate manner, and would expose the farce of the Clinton candidacy. No time to waste here.

Scripting News for 1/23/2008

share.opml.org, retired 

We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.

Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn’t.

Normally, we’d leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut expenses now that the S3 bill is going up, serving some big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan.

If there’s a big demand to bring it back, we can — but that’s going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don’t think it’s a good investment for me.

Still diggin!

My Digg clone — from Reddit! 

11/26/07: “I wonder if we could start a Digg-like community with the readers of Scripting News.”

It would be the editorial system of a community formed around this blog. Eventually, every blog with even a small number of regular readers would have one. The bigger the blog, the more like Digg it would be. That’s not necessarily a good thing, because as these things get large, they move away from the eclectic and toward the humdrum

1/22/08: “You will be able to make three kinds of reddits: public, restricted, and private. A public reddit is just like the current reddits: anyone can view and submit to them. A restricted reddit allows anyone to view the content, but only invited members may submit, comment, or vote. A private reddit is like a restricted reddit, but with the additional restriction that only members can view the content as well. Moderators of a reddit will be able to remove posts and ban users from their reddits.”

Bing!

Scaling is like memory management 

Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment.

Matt Tucker said: “I’m not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task.”

To which I responded… It won’t make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it.

Right now I can’t buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today.

I remember word processors that didn’t do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that’s it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another.

Technology will go forward and scaling won’t be a black art, it’ll be something built into the software you license.

Scripting News for 1/22/2008

The UGC limb, day 2 

Following up on yesterday’s piece on UGC as a business model.

Lots of commenters, including John Furrier, who asked what I meant by: “We could and should be cutting more fair deals with the people who create the value on the net.”

Here’s what I meant…

We should be sharing more than kudos with the creative people and more than revenue too. That’s the next bubble that bursts, imho, it’ll soon be possible for people to set up their own server systems and route around the scams that get people to write stuff that’s worth $100 and get paid $10 (and often $0).

It always works that way throughout history with technology. What’s difficult and mysterious in 2002 is commodotized in 2008.

I think Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and EC2 etc point in that direction. Scalable apps are quickly becoming commodities. The priesthood of developers who can make scalable apps is about to burst into flames. I’ve been around this loop too many times to not recognize it.

Now, what would be more fair deals?

1. First and foremost — equity. If I’m going to pour my creativity into your business, I want the same upside you give a key engineer, or the massage guy or cook at Google. There’s an invisible line that Silicon Valley hasn’t figured out how to cross, yet. Some startup will figure it out, they’ll give equity to their key users and community members, and their business will get all the good content.

2. Control of my own data. The clearest sign that a company thinks I’m a sharecropper and they’re the bossman is that they won’t let me move my data where I want it to go. If you give me the power, that doesn’t mean I’ll use it, btw. It might mean quite the opposite — empowered to use my data in more meaningful ways, I might be happy to leave it where it is. Imagine if Fidelity wouldn’t let you move money to Schwab. I don’t imagine too many people would put their money there. Great writing and art work the same way.

Now what are the key trends to watch for?

1. As I said above, the key elements of scalable systems are being commoditized. It’s amazing how many apps are migrating to S3. Why Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, to name just a few, aren’t getting into this business is a mystery. It can’t be much longer before one or more of them do.

2. The next step after that will be packaged applications that deploy through Amazon that you can buy for shrinkwrap prices. Yesterday I downloaded a Jabber server from Jive Software. Nice, but it would be so much nicer if, instead of installing as an app that runs on one of my machines, it deployed to run on one of Amazon’s. If would take care of backing itself up, controllable through a web interface of course, to S3. Give me a small, simple desktop app that burns a DVD of my data, so I can have something local to put in the safe deposit box, guarding against the possibility that Amazon goes away or S3 loses data. This is so rational, we have to be going in this direction. When we do, it’ll mean that the magic of the backroom scaling expert will become a commodity you can buy cheap. Another priesthood goes poof.

And here’s the key point, all that will be left will be the creativity. The users won’t need you. So you’d be better off investing in users instead of priests. Or hedge, and invest in both.

Sit down Bill Clinton 

If Bill Clinton doesn’t get off the campaign trail, other leading Dems should get out and stump for Obama, to level the field.

I said this on Twitter and Adam Wygle sent a pointer to this site, that says it better than I could.

22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…”

FlickrFan update 

Change #28: Roll back the clock on updates.

A new page that lets you set the date for updating. We install all new or updated parts since that date.

Screen shot.

NY Times on the Internet 

AT&T makes a deal with the NY Times for their mobile site on their “operator portal.”

Curious speculation that Google could buy the NY Times.

They could, easily. Google’s market cap is $185 billion. The Times is worth about $2 billion.

iPhone as photo gallery 

Kevin Tofel explains how to use an iPhone as a portable handheld photo gallery using the beautiful AP wire photos and FlickrFan.

I did a Qik video demo using my Nokia N95. Lots of computers involved, the quality ain’t great but the idea is pretty neat.